OUR MAPLE SYRUP MAKING DAYS:
alan skeoch
March 2018
There is an old expression…a sad one…”My days are in the yellow leaf.” This comes to mind always in the month of March because many years ago when the kids were small and Marjorie and I were naive that month was maple syrup month. A family enterprise. We tapped the trees in the maple bush at the back of the Saunders farm close to the fourth line road. By chance we purchased all the stuff we needed from a couple of farm sales…50 to 60 sap pails with hooks on the side, a bucket full of smiles, a hand drill, a big boiling pan, another smaller finishing pan. and, oddly, a dozen old milk cans. The system worked. On week ends and after school we would zip up to the sugar bush, slosh the sap into the milk cans, haul them by sleigh to the truck and drive back to the city where a huge pile of drift wood had been gathered from the shores of Lake Ontario over the winter months.
A picnic bench floated in one day, smashed up a bit, and one day while I was taking our the bolts a City Parks truck pulled up beside me.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Gathering scrap wood for our maple syrup making.”
“That bench is City property.”
“Not now, give me a hand some of these bolts are
tight.” And they did. Even helped me load other drift wood.
“Save us the work when the ground dries up.”
We Lit the fire in the evenings and sat there with the wood smoke filling our lungs and pores as the last bits of snow fell. On March mornings the sun began to warm the ground and the maple sap coursed upwards in the maple bush 40 miles away. Synergy. But It was not an efficient operation. Foolish I suppose but so invigorating. Others rushed to Florida on March break. We did
down sap into syrup. Now I ask you, what makes more sense?
When the wild onions pushed through the leaf cover we knew the sap taking and syrup making was coming to an end. Then we filled the Crown sealers with the black syrup. Black? Of course a lot of ash got in our syrup carried by the wood smoke. No problem. Gave a little body to the syrup although we did filter out the huge chunks.
Syrup making days ended for a variety of reasons. First was the son off a bitch who spent a day shooting the sap cans full of holes with a 22 rifle just to watch the sap spurt out to the ground below. Someone did not like our venture. Maybe someone we knew. Jealousy is a powerful force. Another reason was the objection of a neighbour, maybe more than one neighbour, as the large clouds of smoke from the wet burning wood drifted directly into the neighbours back porch and kitchen. “Killing us, please stop;” he had a point.
Then there was the issue of lead soldered sap pails. Illegal soon after our sap days began. “Must use aluminum or better still plastic feeder lines to a central tank. Talk about killjoys. And finally the kids grew up. What was worse? The kids growing up was worse because sap making was a family operation. Something we could all do together.
Like all things in life, sap making came to an end. As I said before “Syrup making days were in the yellow leaf.”
I found a quart of the syrup in the cellar the other day. Black. Think we’ll keep it as a souvenir…a reminder of good times.
alan skeoch
March 2018
